i went into this expecting to at least have a reasonably fun time being a big sonic fan, but i was bored by the second zone. for me personally it's not enough for sonic to just stop remixing levels from older games, i want to see some genuinely cool and creative locations, stuff like the best of sonic mania gave me a glimpse of such as press garden or titanic monarch. everything in sonic superstars however is just so incredibly pedestrian, from the stage design, to the level gimmicks, to the aesthetics; seaside level, jungle level, kinda cloudy temple level, pinball casino level, desert level, ice level, grey factory level for the finale, and so on. all of it serviceable more or less, but I was left feeling quite hollow, i was kinda on autopilot for most of it which is why i don't really have much to say

even when the game gets a tiny bit more original such as a city made of gold (which reuses the pinball elements from an earlier level but yk) the backgrounds are so basic and scant on detail that they lack any sense of place. golden capital, the level in question's background had an obscenely exaggerated depth of field effect smeared over it that i got suspicious, and turning it off revealed a barren, frankly abhorrent vista of textureless mountains and grass that looks like a first draft of what the general landscape was going to look like, but it seems there was only time to just blur all that out and call it a day.

the game's art style is quite similar to classic sonic's levels in sonic generations, and let's just say that comparing those visuals, and especially the backgrounds to that twelve-year-old game wouldn't exactly be favourable. generations would also make better use of its camera, which would tilt or zoom to emphasise certain moments to great effect, but superstars' is almost entirely static, and generally feels a bit too zoomed-in and claustrophobic to give me a good grasp of my surroundings

the music similarly disappoints, being neither catchy and hummable nor atmospheric in my opinion. a couple of the songs are okay but it mostly sounded like generic background noise to me, and i wasn't thrilled to hear the sonic 4 styled instrumentation being present in like half of the entire soundtrack, the game's worst song being the boss theme, which is a bland yet simultaneously annoying ten second loop that you will spend minutes at a time listening to at very frequent intervals, because of the way the bosses work now

while i found most of the stages themselves quite bland, occasionally annoying, but ultimately inoffensive, the boss fights made sure to stamp out any sort of goodwill i had left for them. rather than being conducive to speedrunning like other classic sonic games are by allowing you to be proactive and do damage at all times, sonic superstars forces you to wait around and dodge attacks while the boss hangs out in the background or is inexplicably invincible until the game gives you an opportunity to hit them one time, and the cycle begins anew.

the player's skill dictates the pace of a fight to a much lesser degree now, there'll be some moments where you can sneak an extra hit by like bouncing one of their attacks back at them or something, but this is still extremely limiting. you're still mostly just dodging attacks, which is far less engaging than dodging AND going on the offensive, there's also a lot of cases where the boss just kinda stares at you for a bit and does nothing which always really got on my nerves like please just hurry the fuck up fang i hate you. sonic has had some iffy bosses like this in the past don't get me wrong, but here basically ALL of them are iffy, the only one i can think of that works more traditionally is that fight against that big piggy bank guy who sucks up your rings (which is an idea just lifted from sonic advance 3 but whatever)

these encounters are filled with so much dead air that they end up usually being longer than the actual levels they're a part of, just like four straight minutes of that stupid song that loops after ten seconds while you sit there twiddling your thumbs like a nob, and when you die to something stupid, like the various instant-kill attacks they start chucking in there as the game goes on it hurts more than ever because of the amount of nothing you have to sit through all over again. this is shit, and turns an otherwise perfectly mediocre game into a slog.

the game is lacking in polish in some quite significant ways too, when i got to that cyber level in trip's story, the effect where you're turned into a little minecraft guy was completely broken every time i jumped, displaying her regular jump animation but frozen in place wrapped around her minecraft body, which was quite disturbing. latching onto a wall in this new form would leave her stuck in place, unable to move, or do anything other than pause the game. i was softlocked twice before opting to just trying to do the level without using her signature ability that the level design was changed to accommodate

this corrected itself later in the level, expect now my double jump wasn't working, she'd do the animation for it but wouldn't gain any extra height or anything, which needless to say made the shitty boss fight of that levels a lot more difficult

the story also just felt unfinished, like i don't need a particularly gripping narrative or anything for this type of game but it was bizarre how much basic context was just left completely missing; everything about trip being being forced to work for eggman and then being able to turn into a dragon so she's like all strong now and can join the good guys and like what eggman's plan with her even was can all kinda be inferred i suppose from what we do get, but it's weird how it's paced like you play levels and then something important will just kinda happen without fanfare and you just sorta have to go along with it so it's hard to feel anything from it other than just 'okay'.

trip literally has a story dedicated to her but it's just almost entirely identical to the main campaign and you don't actually learn anything about her, and it does like the thing where an egg robo is the villain like when you play as knuckles in sonic 3, but then it suddenly becomes about fang and his giant robot at the last second and it's like 'okay'.

then you get a last story where a dragon comes out of the sea and goes rahhh and you gotta fight it i guess and it's this game's token super sonic boss battle except it's designed like all the other bosses in the game, where there's a load of waiting around and does a load of attacks, except you're super sonic so its attacks just don't do anything to you. the whole point of these is that you're invincible, but your rings are ticking down like a timer and you have to focus on getting rings and usually catching up to something, the attacks slow you down which is bad, but in this case you're not being slowed down at all, you're not catching up to anything bro's hanging out in the background what's the point of this you're just going left and right and getting rings, it only matters in the brief window where it does one particular attack that makes it vulnerable, and hey guess what the whole affair takes like ten agonising minutes when you know what to do, if say, you don't know what to do because the mechanics of the fight are so poorly conveyed and you die trying to figure out what to do, then be prepared to sit through the entire thing from the beginning all over again, it's actually a little insane how bad it is

this is the first time i've played a new sonic game since forces came out and ruined christmas for sixteen year old for me, i never stopped being a fan of the series or anything but i was no longer interested in obsessing over it and following all the hype cycles and new releases and went on to try so many new things as i got older instead of just playing the same six or seven sonic games over and over as i did as a teen. if this game is anything to go by, i'd say i made the right call; it still feels very much like the series i left